


daughters of witches

by lonelyghosts



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Child Abuse, Crockertier, Gen, Grimbark, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 04:24:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: The Condesce has always had a soft spot for girls who hate themselves for the way their bodies go up in flames.[Or: Jane, Jade, and the Condesce.]





	daughters of witches

**Author's Note:**

> anyone think about the condesce & the fact that she lived on earth with jake & jane and jade & john as her kids? no? it's just me?
> 
> anyways. obviously the condesce is a VERY unreliable narrator in this but i wanted to write about the Creepier side of the condesce- like, yeah she's fish puns and gold jewelry and kickass hair, but she also a) was implied to have had an incredibly creepy relationship w/ the psiioniic, who couldnt say no to her ever b) was an abusive mom to jade english & john crocker & jane egbert & jake harley and c) literally can mind control people. 
> 
> so heres my take on the Creepy Fucked Up Condesce!
> 
> edit: HUSSIE WHEN I SAID I WANTED MORE CONDESCE/BETA TIMELINE JANE CONTENT I DIDNT WANT THIS

Her Imperious Condescension sits on a purple-shining throne in the Dersian towers, and at her feet is her daughter and granddaughter, her heiress.

There is a pang of memory here. The Condesce remembers Jane from two different lives and both were so similar. This girl she molded, broke and bruised into quiet. She remembers the girl who clenched her teeth and smiled despite her trembling fists, the one who tried to believe in good things against all evidence to the contrary.

This is her Crocker girl- enduring the weight of a red circlet that shines ruby bright, heavy on her brow. This is the girl who told herself that it was normal, it was fine, it was alright, that the whole world was perfectly normal and nothing was wrong. Carpet bombs in her mailbox and pink lines of text in her pesterchum trying to tell her the strange and terrible truth and Jane Crocker still tries to hang on to the lie.

This is her Egbert girl, too- abandoned to a kitchen, still waiting for a runaway twin brother who never knocks at the front door. Too scared to leave home, the proper housewife for years despite the way it chafed at her. Her head used to perk up whenever anyone spoke in that mangled British drawl, hoping against hope that it was her brother come home.

The Condesce remembers her Heiress, the way Jane hated herself for the way she allowed the burning. Whether Egbert or Crocker, Jane is still the little Red Riding Hood- trusting her grandmother, eyes wide, not knowing that a warm house with a burning fire and an old woman with sharp teeth in the bed can be just as dangerous as the howling of the wolves outside.

Or maybe she knows- Jane isn’t stupid, after all. Maybe she knows that it’s not much better in here. She can divine the truth from the way her grandmother leaves bruises and hisses words like if she puts enough malice into them, she can make Jane bleed red, but she loves her granny too much to venture outside into the black night and its star-studded sky. Or she knows running is useless anyways. So despite the way her heart echoes the howling of the wolves to run wild, Jane stays.

She hates herself for it, sure. She hates every moment, she makes escape plans and theorizes, but she stays, and well, the Condesce can’t help but want to reward that loyalty!

So she bestows a boon upon her. She brings her blue daughter in from the cold and crowns her scarlet with the humming warmth of an overheating tiara, allows her girl to stand at her side as her right hand despite the ways she has faltered in the past.

And Jane is so grateful- well, she should be!- and so in the towers of Derse she kneels. She’s just a little slip of a thing, the Maid of Life, still so young, but she’s just as much Egbert as she is Crocker, and the Condesce knows it; it’s in her hollow, world-weary eyes, in her battle scars. There are moments, the Condesce thinks, of resistance, of flinching, but she finds that she can forgive Jane her little slips of rebellion.

After all, here is her daughter all dressed in red, the way the Condesce liked her best, still asking for approval with those wide blue eyes, and well, she can’t say no to a face like that!

So the Condesce draws her girl up to her feet, smiles with each and every one of her needle-sharp teeth, and tells her Red Riding Hood that she’s done well.

* * *

She goes to find Jade and finds the poor thing seething in a bathroom, curled up on the floor. The Condesce enters and the girl looks up, her eyes full of green tears, and isn’t this cosmic irony? 

This girl who was once a symbol of defiance, looking up at her all teary. This girl was her son’s last ‘fuck you’ to his mother- even though by then his mother had long since left him. Jake Harley was always willing to stick it to his mother, even when she hadn’t been seen in years. 

But this girl has always been more than her birth (or, well, ectocreation). She is defiance all her own- Jade has always been wild. Burnt deep like a brand into her DNA is love, her love for the wind in her streaming cascade of hair and the sun bright and warm on her face, for the lush and vibrant greenery underneath her bare feet and all around her. This girl ran with something beyond animal, slept curled at its side, buried her face in its white fur and breathed in the comforting scent of her untamed island, dirt and sweat and underneath it all the tang of metallic-sweet radiation. 

Or it was nothing more than a dog, and she ran with something entirely canine but loved it as if it were a side of her soul, just as wild and free despite her stifling house on the hilltop. This girl learned bass guitar because it angered her alien mother, because it burned away the silence until she didn’t feel quite so lonely. 

The Condesce’s mirrored daughter is steel, fire-tested. Jade Harley’s fingers are nimble and scarred from years of fiddling with parts in order to make sure the lights stay on, her legs are thick and solid with muscle because running makes her forget she’s hungry. This girl grew up alone and doesn’t know what the words not your fault means. It’s up to her, that’s all, she figures, lit by candles as she gnaws on a pencil and allocates the canned food for the next month. If it doesn’t work, well, then she did something wrong. Doesn’t help to blame others when they aren’t here to help. 

And then there’s a game and she breaks and screams and cries because it’s too much, it’s more than she’s ever dreamed, everything is going wrong and she can’t stop it, can’t fix it, she’s supposed to be able to fix it. There is a dreamself sobbing and a girl screaming abuse, frogs and never enough time, and Bec is gone, and it’s all so much she can’t stand it any longer. 

In the end she pushes through it, just like the Condesce knew she would. Jade patches herself back together but she’s always holding herself back after that. Never lets herself be angry because Jade is a good girl and good girls don’t burn, don’t go up in flames for the sake of setting the world afire. 

Jade English is angry, too, but it’s not quite the same as her mirror sister. She wants to be wild, she rages against the restrictions that hold her back. The Condesce _loves_ it, loves this little girl who is nothing but teeth and snarls and biting back. 

Maybe she went too far that time, she admits privately, ended up breaking the poor thing a little _too_ well- she really didn’t mean to kill the barkbeast but _god_ , that broken look on the girl’s face. The way her brother had backed away from the slumped white body on the ground and away from his sister, the way Jade had screamed verbal abuse up at her. For weeks after she’d tiptoed out to listen as the little girl sobbed herself to sleep, had basked in the sound. 

She hadn’t meant to drive the girl away permanently, but it was inevitable after that stunt, she supposed. The Condesce had let her go- she’d properly broken john Crocker at that point, after all, twisted all the light and laughter out of him, but she’d miss the girl. It was fun, after all, to twist her anger, to make her wonder if it was her fault, if she was responsible. The girl had run before the Condesce had been able to hammer the message home, but Jade English had always carried those seeds inside her- she’s my mother, and I’m responsible for what she’s done, what she’s doing. In the end it became so much larger than Halley. 

The Condesce sees her, floating in the dark and in the midst of a parental reunion, and is struck by the deepness of her pity for this little thing. It’s not romantic, she has standards, the poor thing isn’t even eight sweeps old. She thinks she understands what humans meant when they talked about family. 

That is not to call it healthy either. It never is, she doesn’t know what it means to pity or hate in a way that doesn’t end up hurting her partner. But she does want this, she wants this little girl to just let go of all the tension in her shoulders and her back and the worry lines in her face. the anger smolders within her and it would be so easy- so easy to just push her right along- 

She doesn’t think about it, just pulls the girl until she’s compliant and then she burrows in, pushes up the girl’s head and perks up her ears until Jade can hear nothing but the screams of the horrorterrors, and the girl shudders, goes limp before the green fire lights and pulls her up from the brief darkness of the Furthest Ring’s comas. 

And then she barks. 

The Condesce almost laughs, but there’s more work to do. 

Later, in Derse’s tower, she looks down lovingly on her girl-wolf. Here is her lost lamb in from the dark. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that this is her wolf, the thing prowling outside. Because weren’t they all little cubs once? The Condesce was once a wriggler herself, many thousands of sweeps ago. Not any longer- she does not delude herself. She is a monster, though it’s treason if anyone says it but herself. That’s fine, though, she’s all right with being a villain. The villains are much more interesting than the heroes, she finds. 

But Jade- she’s a wolf, or a huntswoman, there’s not much of a difference. Both of them end up with blood on them in the end. She tries to save the little red girl from her witch grandmother and ends up in a thrall. Here’s the girl who hates herself because her rebellions are never enough. No matter how many times the wolf eats the witch in the cottage, someone comes along and cuts open her stomach to pull the woman out, sews her back up with stones. In the end it weighs her down to her drowning death. It’s never enough and Jade is full of rage against herself for not stopping it, for not being able to solve all problems, full of resentment because she has the audacity to feel angry towards others when it’s all her fault. 

The Condesce crouches down and draws up the girl’s chin so that their eyes meet, and the look on her face is so vulnerable that she can’t help but be gentle with her.  

“It’s all right, little wolf,” she tells the girl, and Jade nods unconsciously when she says it. “You can be angry now.” 

After, the Condesce leads her girl to the throne room, where Jane lights up at the sight of the two of them, comes to the Condesce’s side to flank her. 

In the back of the room there’s a mirror, and they are all reflected back at her, these daughters and their mother-queen; an old woman in the jungle with a rifle and a need to redeem herself for her mother's cruel work, a girl with nimble fingers and the inability to let blame slide away from her, an heiress to an empire who does not know how to give up her crown, a daughter in the kitchen trapped and stifled and forever waiting for a brother who does not come home. 

And of course in the middle it is her, because all roads lead back to her in the end- Betty Crocker, who learned the art of being human all too well, a Batterwitch on a dying planet desperate to bring back her race from extinction. And herself as she is truly, a queen who does not bow to anyone except for a monstrous man in green, who bedecks herself in jewelry and purple-pink and who is the last and most terrifying of all Empresses. 

The Condesce likes this picture, the Red Riding Hood all in bloodred silk, and the Wolf on a leash with all of her anger finally set loose, and the Witch amid and above them all. At last, her daughters are home. 

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this during a particularly long congress tournament (minneapple competitors hmu) and im very tired but yknow what? i love jade & jane


End file.
